


Just Give Me A Reason

by deandratb



Series: Distant Horizons and Familiar Shores [3]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, brief appearance by Cliff Calley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 01:56:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13066725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deandratb/pseuds/deandratb
Summary: The truth comes out while they wait for the return of Donna's diary.“I wasn’t mad that you lied. I...I was mad about Cliff. And not just because of his job.” Josh hunches a little. “Sue me, I’m human.”





	Just Give Me A Reason

**Author's Note:**

> This is an expansion of a moment from the existing series, so the part before the asterisks is taken verbatim from that earlier story of mine. Everything after is new. :)

The fountain fills the silence between them while they wait for Cliff to bring back her journal. When Josh speaks, it startles her.

“I wasn’t angry at you.”

Her hollow laugh is barely audible over the bubbling water. “Yes, you were.”

“No. I was scared for you. I’ve seen what happens when these guys find an opening. It’s always the people with the least power they go after, and they’re the ones who pay, even when they’re not the ones who should.”

Donna turns to look at him. “But nobody should have to pay. The President didn’t lie, nobody else even knew. This is a witchhunt.”

“So?” He raises his eyebrows, pushed past his usual level of guilt and frustration with the system. “Tell that to the staffers I had to fire when Lillienfield kickstarted those stupid drug interviews. Tell that to Charlie, who’s looking at a lifetime of lawyer fees because he’s within earshot of the Oval Office.”

She slumps, shaking her head. “This isn’t the world we should live in.”

“Well, it’s all we’ve got.” He closes the space between them, tugging her gently into the curve of his arm as he leans back against the bench.

She feels him breathe. Quickly in, slowly out. Like Josh himself, it’s more comforting than it should be.

“Anyway, I wasn’t mad,” he reiterates. “At least, not about that.”

****

Josh lapses into silence, leaving Donna to consider what he’s not saying. She’s not entirely sure she wants to know, given how touchy and on edge he’s been since she told him about Cliff.

But like it or not, she can’t leave it alone--sitting between them, coloring their usually lighthearted friendship.

“It makes you angry?”

Josh doesn’t bother to feign ignorance; he has been waiting for the reckoning of this, even as the idea terrifies him. “Sometimes.”

“I don’t understand,” she tells her feet quietly. “It’s not like--nobody’s doing anything to you. What makes you angry?”

He feels compelled to give her something that he does not deserve to share--maybe to show her that she’s not alone in making mistakes. “You,” he replies honestly.

Donna jerks away in response, so genuinely shocked by his admission that she almost falls off the bench. His arm moves instantly to curl around her waist. Though obviously he doesn’t want to see her fall, he can’t entirely blame protective reflex. He’s relieved to give up their tense distance, to actually connect.

Of course, the moment he finds himself holding onto her he lets go as though she were on fire. _Not yours,_ he reminds himself. _Not safe._

Incredulously, Donna stares at him from the farthest edge of the bench. “I make you angry? How? Why?”

Hearing the questions that she can’t bear to ask, he curses his impulsively honest moment. “It’s not anything that you do. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” She snaps back. “You can’t do better than ‘it’s not you, it’s me?’ What is wrong with you?”

_Everything, really._ Running his hands through his hair, Josh sighs. 

“You smell like cinnamon and pears, okay? You’re probably the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen when you’re not wearing makeup. And I’ve spent four years having to watch every word I say, every move I make--so that I would never do this.”

With his volume rising at the end, Josh pours all of his frustration into a lightning-quick turn towards her. His mouth meets hers before she's finished absorbing his outburst, and her clouded brain thinks that it feels like touching the sun.

Then her rational side clicks back into place, and Donna pulls back, gaping at him.

He winces. “God, that was stupid. Cliff could be coming back any second.”

“Focus, Joshua. What-what was that, exactly?” 

“I thought it was pretty self-explanatory.”

She shakes her hair, wisps of blonde floating in the humid air. “No. No, it’s really not. You just **kissed** me.”

_Could this night get any worse? She’s really going to make him spell it out?_

“I wasn’t mad that you lied. I...I was mad about Cliff. And not just because of his job.” Josh hunches a little. “Sue me, I’m human.”

“Are you trying to tell me you were jealous?”

“Yeah. I’m not proud of it.”

Donna thinks about that for a minute. Then she nods. “And the red dress, last year. That rant of yours, about me and men. I just thought you were being especially...Joshlike. Was that jealousy, too?” 

He sighs. “Maybe.”

“You know, you’re like the tallest five-year-old I know sometimes.” 

“Huh?”

“If you liked me, why couldn’t you just say something? Instead you get jealous and mean and then just when it hurts the most, you say the sweetest things. You might as well be chasing me on the playground.”

“Hey, you know I suck at this. It’s not news.”

“It’s news to me! Don’t you think I deserved to know how you felt? That it might be useful information for me to have?”

Josh shrugs. “Not really.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” Arms crossed, Donna glares at him.

“What good would it have done--really?” He frowns back at her, starting to get annoyed again. “It just would have made things weird. Awkward. Or it would’ve been, like, sexual harassment. I was never going to put you in that position.”

“Josh.” Her voice goes soft. Sometimes, he is such an idiot...but he’s **her** idiot. 

He turns toward her, shutting out the larger world. “Yeah.”

“If you had said something, I could have told you it isn’t weird.” She tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, Josh’s eyes following her fingers. “I could have told you it’s not just you. Did that never occur to you?”

“What, that you...” He can’t even finish the question. He can’t say the words. Confessing his feelings was one thing--letting himself hope for something he can’t have just might break him.

Josh shifts away, shaking his head. “No. Of course it didn’t.”

Now Donna sighs. “Of course not. Josh Lyman, you can be so dumb sometimes that it astounds me you went to Harvard.”

“And Yale,” he points out automatically.

“Right. Well, genius, you want to talk sexual harassment? How do you think you’ve managed to get away with comments about bondage and French maids for **four years** without a single reprimand? You really think I would’ve let just anybody talk to me that way?”

He blinks. “No. I mean, it’s our thing. It’s how we are. We joke around.”

“Do you see me joking around like that with Sam or Toby?”

Josh’s brow furrows. “No.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. We’re just...different.”

“Yes. We are.” She reaches for his hand, a breach of their usual protocol. Extreme measures are clearly going to be needed if she wants to get through to him.

“Josh, we’ve been different since you found me in your office and gave me your pass.”

He grins. “I’ll never be able to understand your plan there. How long did you think you were going to be able to fake your way into a job?”

“The campaign was chaos,” Donna points out. “It worked for a while.”

“And you got the job,” he agrees.

“I did. Why was that, exactly?”

“What?” His feigned confusion isn’t convincing at all; he already knows where this is heading. They have never actually talked about it, and he hoped they never would.

“Why did you decide to let me stay, put me on payroll, bring me into the administration? You never **had** to. There were more qualified candidates, we both know that.”

It’s too late to hedge. He’s lost all hope of putting this mess back in the box it belongs in. If he’s going to lose her because he told the truth...it might as well be the whole truth.

“There probably were. I wanted you.”

“Yeah.” She doesn’t look surprised by this confession--which is, for Josh, an epiphany. If anything, Donna looks relieved. 

“When we met,” she tells him, trading secret for secret, “I thought you were the most stressed out person I had ever seen.”

He laughs. “Sounds about right.”

She squeezes his hand before continuing. “Then, when you tried to kick me out, and I made my argument, you listened. And before you agreed, for just a moment, there was this click.”

Josh doesn’t respond when she pauses, so Donna keeps going.

“You were looking at me, just staring, and it was like there was no building full of people waiting on your orders, no phones ringing and lunch orders being placed and staffers trying to figure out the power dynamics. It was just you, and me. And you kept staring, like...” She can’t figure out how to explain it, but somehow it feels crucial, essential, that she try. “Like I was a revelation. Like you’d been waiting for me, all these years, and you didn’t even know it until there I was.”

“Nobody had ever looked at me that way before,” Donna adds quietly. “And no one else has since. But you still do.”

Unable to take his eyes off her face, Josh nods, slowly. It’s the only response she’s going to get, so she continues.

“You have a really difficult job, Josh. I know that, no matter how much you play it down--I know it better than anyone. It takes over your life, what little free time you have...it takes up all your attention. So maybe that’s why you don’t see it, or maybe you’ve just been too afraid to look--”

“Afraid?” Josh cuts her off, prepared to be offended on principle, before she stubbornly continues and the rest of her sentence shuts him up.

“Maybe that’s why you’re with me every day and somehow you’ve never looked back at me and noticed...that you’re a revelation for me, too.”

“What?”

Donna smiles. “You heard me.”

“Actually, I think I might be hallucinating.”

“You’re not.”

“I--”

Cliff crosses the street toward them, and Josh leans away from her, trying to look nonchalant. Donna would laugh at just how bad he is at it, if she weren’t so anxious.

“Here.” Cliff gives her back her diary without making eye contact.

“We’re good?” Josh asks, rubbing a hand over her arm.

“Yeah.” Cliff shrugs, as though he’s even more uncomfortable than they are, and steps back. “We’re good. Just...don’t ever do that again,” he adds to Donna.

Automatically, Josh leans closer to her, not a fan of Cliff’s tone. _Or face. Or political affiliation._

“Have a nice night,” he says, dismissing him with a nod.

Donna doesn’t say anything at all, too mortified to do more than watch him walk away and thank God that she’s not going to prison. It’s terrible, but she’s already forgotten him before he’s out of sight--she’s too busy wondering what Josh was about to say before Cliff came back.

“So,” she ventures, eyeing him from under her lashes.

“So.” Josh stands, the slightly damp air chilling her in his absence. “I guess that’s that.”

“I...I guess so.” Is he talking about the diary, or everything else? _At this point, who knows? It’s Josh._

“You gonna head home?”

“Yeah. I should,” she says, reluctance slowing her words. “Early day tomorrow.” _Early day **every** day,_ Donna reminds herself, feeling moronic. 

She never should have pushed the issue. If they hadn’t brought it out into the open, things could have gone on without being this painfully awkward. They could have kept the banter, and the occasional sweetness, and that perfect feeling of being known and understood that helped her survive the endless bad dates with adequate men.

But no, she had to ask; she had to ruin it. Just the idea of going back to work with everything slightly off-balance, less bright, less comfortable...the melancholy threatens to drown her.

He breaks through her thoughts, eyebrows hopefully raised. “I’ll walk you?”

For some reason, the way Josh phrases it like a question makes her smile. He can be so unsure of himself, underneath the bravado. She loves him all the more for it.

“Sure,” Donna answers, letting him take her hand as she leaves the bench.

_Maybe confronting their feelings wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe it was time for things to change._

_Maybe--just maybe--what came next would be better._

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from "Just Give Me A Reason" by Pink & Nate Ruess.


End file.
